Additive manufacturing is a process used to produce three-dimensional (3D) objects. Additive manufacturing can be performed by extruding a material through a nozzle and depositing (typically layer-by-layer) the material onto a substrate to form an object. In some instances, the material used to form the layers of the 3D object may be referred to herein as “build material.” Extrusion-based additive manufacturing is sometimes called “Fused Deposition Modeling®” (FDM®), which is a trademark of Stratasys Ltd. Of Edina, Minn., “fused filament fabrication” (FFF), or more generally, “3D printing.”
Additive manufacturing processes often utilize electronic data that represents an object, such as a computer-aided design (CAD) model of the object, to form the object. The electronic data can be processed by a computing device component of the additive manufacturing apparatus (e.g., a 3D printer) to form the object. For example, an electronic representation of the object can be mathematically sliced into multiple horizontal layers. The horizontal layers can have contours that will produce the shape of the object being formed by the additive manufacturing apparatus. The computing device component can generate a build path to form the contours for each horizontal layer and send control signals to the extrusion portion of the additive manufacturing apparatus to move a nozzle along the build path to deposit an amount of the material to form each of the horizontal layers. The horizontal layers are formed on top of each other to deposit fluent strands or “roads” of the build material in a layer-by-layer manner onto a platform or a build substrate. For example, the additive manufacturing system can move an extrusion head/nozzle, the platform/build substrate, or both the nozzle and platform vertically and horizontally relative to each other to form the object. The build material from which the object is formed hardens shortly after extrusion to form a solid 3D object.